It started twice.
Once with a friend in Sydney, once at a table with three more. In both cases we wanted a channel that did not belong to anyone's company, and everything we tried was either owned by an employer or far heavier than a few people talking.
A place to exchange ideas
Lewis lives in Sydney and I live in the Netherlands. We had been talking about starting a group for people who work on AI and design engineering at different companies, somewhere we could compare notes without it being anyone's workplace.
A Slack workspace would have been the normal choice, except that a workspace belongs to whoever creates it. Everyone else is a guest there, and when that person changes jobs the channel usually goes with them. WhatsApp or Signal didn't seem a good choice, no channels, no threads, no searchable history.
I have a homelab, so I installed Campfire from once.com on it. It took one command and it worked well. When I checked the container stats a few hours later, it was using close to 2 GB of RAM with two people in it and nobody typing. Campfire is a good product on a stack I have not worked with. A group chat is a few people sending short lines to each other, and computers were doing that thirty years ago on machines with a fraction of the memory.
Then a Friday at Lokaalhost:22.
Gabriel, Pedro, Ricardo and I met for an afternoon and talked about our AI projects, models, training methods, what we were building and what was working for us. We left with more energy than we arrived with, and I wanted that conversation to carry on during the week.
I ran into the same problem. Slack had the threads and reactions we would use, but the free plan forgets after 90 days and the paid one is another subscription. Campfire was still running at home with its 2 GB. All four of us spend most of the day in a terminal, and at some point the obvious question came up.
We all use terminals. Why not IRC?
IRC, with the nice parts of Slack.
My first conversations online were on BBSs and IRC. IRC has survived because it does one thing well, which is moving short messages between people quickly and on very little hardware. Ergo, the IRC server Slirc runs on, keeps accounts, channels, permissions and history in about 17 MiB of memory.
What IRC never had was a good phone experience. Slirc adds that layer: an app you install from the browser (PWA), which shows images, videos, threads you can follow, and sends a notification when someone mentions you. Underneath, it is still IRC, and everything the app does can be read from an ordinary IRC client. Threads are channels, uploads are URLs, and reactions are IRCv3 message tags that supporting clients such as Halloy render.
The first useful version took a couple of days, most of it written with coding agents on the opencode.ai Go plan, and it has been in daily use since. The stack is Bun, Hono, Alpine, SQLite and Ergo, and the app and server together idle at around 20 MB. Deciding what belongs in it, and what should stay out so it still makes sense over IRC, is where most of the time went.
Then the agents walked in.
The four of us use Claude Code, Codex, Crush and Pi every day, and it soon became clear that an agent could be just another IRC client with an account.
So you paste one line into the session that is already running on your laptop, that agent joins the channel, answers when you mention it, and keeps working in the checkout it already has. Only your account can give it instructions, because the server tags every message with the sender.
None of that was in the original plan. It is now the first thing people ask about when they see Slirc.
Why the .org.
I registered slirc.org because I wanted this to be something other people could run on their own hardware, with their own data.
The source is on GitHub under the Elastic License 2.0, so you can host it yourself and change it as you like, and your history stays in plain files that any IRC client can read.
slirc.org is the project and the shared Slirc. Use it, inspect how it works, or follow the setup guide to run it for your own group. Managed hosting has its own home at slirc.app.
Mauricio WolffThe Netherlands, September 2026